I hope you are staying well and finding calm during this tumultuous time. A singer friend of mine asked me if I was blogging right now.

To be honest? Nope, not for a while.

And I’ve been should-ing on myself about it (and many other things).

Then I realized that this cycle of struggling to start, experiencing large shifts in my energy and ability to focus, and holding a vague sense of guilt about it all was/is familiar. I’ve experienced all of these feelings before in my life as a self-employed vocal musician.

Luckily(?), I have over a decade of practice being self-supervised* as my sister calls it. I’ve had to create schedule and structure to my work life before, I’ve worried about having too little work before, and I’ve wondered how I will pay my bills before. And I have built schedule, found (or created) work and paid my bills before. So while the consequences of this pandemic sometimes take those worries to a new level, they are at least (in some ways) familiar.

In fact, I have already written about a lot of those feelings here.

So, in lieu of finding the energy, focus and head space to write thoughtful, introspective new posts, I am going to point you to some posts of the past. I hope something here is useful, inspiring (or at least entertaining or distracting *smile*) for you.

• Sarah, Meet Stuck
• Thinking Up a Plan
• The Best Medicine (I obviously added the Melanie DeMore song above.)

Be well and keep singing.

P.S. *My sister coined the phrase self-supervised in the early years of her doctoral work.

[flv:http://songtaneous.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/InThisPlace.flv 450 337]

One of the things I enjoy about improvising with words is what I discover about my state of mind. Sometimes, I uncover what I’m thinking or feeling as I hear the words come out of my mouth. It’s a strange, somewhat surreal and very open experience.

I sang this on our first singing day in Tenerife. While singing, I explored the connection I felt to the people and the place. (I felt this connection over and over again during my time there.)

The audio file below is an excerpt from a much longer (about 30 minutes) piece we created during Session 2 of my year-long improv class using a process Rhiannon calls shape-shifting.

In a shape-shift, the music starts somewhere and is allowed to … yep, you guessed it … shift. Another aspect of the shape-shift format is that often part of the group sings and the other receives the music, usually sitting or lying in the center of the singing circle.

On several occasions during our 10 days at Jardin Mariposa, the owner, Petra, invited friends to meet and sing with us. (That’s how I met Leiko and got to go to the local beach. *smile*) She and 3 or 4 others joined us for this shape-shift, which happened during one of our evening singing sessions. (We typically sang 6 to 8 hours a day. I loved every minute of it. *grin*)

We had been singing for quite some time when I was moved to start speaking. This “story singing” is one of the things I began discovering during my 30-day song-capade and it really solidified during this second session.

http://songtaneous.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/tellyou.mp3